te!

She dashed back the heavy hair matted over her brows by the rain; she
glanced rapidly around her; she beheld the window of her bed-chamber
with the old simple curtain still hanging at its accustomed place; she
saw the well-remembered trees, the carefully tended flower-beds, now
drooping mournfully beneath the gloomy sky. Her heart swelled within
her, her breath seemed suddenly arrested in her bosom, as she trod the
garden path and ascended the steps beyond. The door at the top was
ajar. With a last effort she thrust it open, and stood once
more--unaided and unwelcomed, yet hopeful of consolation, of pardon, of
love--within her first and last sanctuary, the walls of her home!

CHAPTER 21.

FATHER AND CHILD.

Forsaken as it appears on an outward view, during the morning of which
we now write, the house of Numerian is yet not tenantless. In one of
the sleeping apartments, stretched on his couch, with none to watch by
its side, lies the master of the little dwelling. We last beheld him
on the scene mingled with the famishing congregation in the Basilica of
St. John Lateran, still searching for his child amid the confusion of
the public distribution of food during the earlier stages of the
misfortunes of besieged Rome. Since that time he has toiled and
suffered much; and now the day of exhaustion, long deferred, the hours
of helpless solitude, constantly dreaded, have at length arrived.

From the first periods of the siege, while all around him in the city
moved gloomily onward through darker and darker changes, while famine
rapidly merged into pestilence and death, while human hopes and
purposes gradually diminished and declined with each succeeding day, he
alone remained ever devoted to the same labour, ever animated by the
same object--the only one among all his fellow-citizens whom no outward
event could influence for good or evil, for hope or fear.

In every street of Rome, at all hours, among all ranks of people, he
was still to be seen constantly pursuing the same hopeless search.
When the mob burst furiously into the public granaries to seize the
last supplies of corn hoarded for the rich, he was ready at the doors
watching them as they came out. When rows of houses were deserted by
all but the dead, he was beheld within, passing from window to window,
as he sought through each room for the treasure that he had lost. When
some few among the populace, in the first days of the pestilence,
unit